[The Chronicle of Philanthropy] ‘We Can Save Our City': The $100 Million Plan to Revive East Oakland

Selena Wilson, CEO of East Oakland Youth Development Center, says philanthropic dollars often bypass programs that are necessary to achieve a mission but not glamorous.

For Carolyn Johnson, the future of East Oakland looks a lot like its past. Not the divestment of recent decades but the once thriving middle-class Black neighborhood of her childhood in the 1970s, where she would ride her bike past blocks and blocks of Black-owned businesses. Where guys on the corner “played saxophone on Friday night and rolled dice and made sure you got across the street correctly.”